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Nobel hopes grow in Malala's home town

Emmanuel Duparcq

Faces of the future: Girls leave Malala Yousufzai's old school in Mingora. Photo: AFP

In Malala Yousufzai's home town in Pakistan, school friends hope to see her win the Nobel peace prize this week.

But they dream in secret, under pressure from a society deeply ambivalent about the teenage activist.

Malala, who survived being shot by the Taliban on October 9 last year, has become a global ambassador for education, feted by celebrities and politicians around the world. But in north-west Pakistan's Swat valley, a deeply conservative area fearful of foreign influence, many regard her with suspicion and even contempt.

Inspiration: Malala Yousafzai. Photo: Reuters

Her long-time friend Safia has no such doubts. Peeling off from a group of girls at a high school in Mingora, the main town in Swat, she spoke in English about her friend and women's rights.

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Malala is among the favourites for the Nobel, which will be awarded on Friday, and Safia said she deserved it.

''A bicycle cannot run with only one wheel: society is like a bicycle, with the male education as the first wheel and female education as the second one,'' she said.

Beautiful, verdant Swat was once a honeypot for tourists, but it was plunged into war in 2007 when the Pakistani Taliban took control and enforced hardline Islamist rule until they were kicked out by the army two years later.

But pockets of militancy remain and a year ago a Taliban hit squad shot Malala in the head at point-blank range on her school bus. Remarkably, Malala survived and has spent the past year in England, first for treatment and then to continue her education. ''Malala is a model, not only for us but for the whole of Pakistan,'' 14-year-old Rehana Noor Bacha said. Since 2011, the proportion of girls going to school in Swat has risen to nearly 50 per cent, from 34 per cent, while that of boys is close to 90 per cent.

But the authorities say they are short of at least 1000 female teachers and 200 classrooms for girls.

Malala's rise to stardom in the West, and her frequent appearances in the media, have brewed suspicion in a society that expects women to remain out of sight and is always quick to blame foreign powers for its ills. The head of girls' education in Swat, Dilshad Begum, explained that in Pashtun society ''people don't like to see women in front of cameras''.

Maulana Gul Naseeb, a prominent figure in the JUI-F, one of Pakistan's leading religious political parties, was more forthright.

''America created Malala in order to promote their own culture of nudity and to defame Pakistan around the world,'' he said.